At a time when clothing retailers are fretting over their business, there’s one segment of the market where sales are actually increasing: plus-size women’s clothing. Discount store Meijer is taking advantage of this change, and is changing things so the plus-size department will go away, and sizes XS through XXXL will be on the same rack together. [More]

For a nursing mother, it can be quite a challenge to find somewhere private to pump breast milk when you aren’t actively feeding your baby. But although a federal law requires employers to provide such a safe spot for workers, one former employee of grocery chain Meijer claims in a lawsuit that there was no such place for her to express breast milk while she was at work, which she says ultimately led to her losing her job. [More]

Police in Michigan and the FBI say they’ve got a man in custody who admitted to spraying a mixture of mouse poison, hand cleaner, and water on produce and other unpackaged food at several grocery stores. [More]

For the second time this month packages of frozen vegetables sold at national retailers has been recalled for possible listeria contamination. CRF Frozen Foods issued a recall of 15 frozen vegetable products sold at Costco and Meijer stores over the weekend. [More]

We’ve all had the blues, but when you need cheering up it shouldn’t involve showing unsuspecting store workers pictures of your junk. That’s what police in Grand Rapids say one man admitted to doing, because he says it cheers him up when he’s not feeling so great.

Meijer is trying to win back customers with an apology and a $10 coupon, after customers were forced to either pay cash or abandon their shopping carts two days in a row last month. The retailer suffered two credit card system failures, two days in a row, that kept shoppers from paying for their goods with credit or debit cards.

Serrano chile peppers add delicious spiciness to your meals, but do you know what is not a delicious fresh ingredient? Salmonella. Random testing turned up signs of the pathogen in a batch of peppers sold in Meijer stores in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. Peppers in that batch may have also ended up at other retailers, including Publix, Walmart, and Harris Teeter. [More]

By now we should all know that once a product has been formally recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, it is illegal for a retailer to sell that item – or to distribute that item to other stores. Yet, there have been several cases in which that rule isn’t followed, leading to stiff fines for the stores. The latest case involves national retailer Meijer paying $2 million in penalties for the continued distribution of 12 recalled products. [More]

This bit of video game lore in a discount store isn’t fodder for the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, because it isn’t something for sale. It’s not a retail antiquity, exactly, but a display in the video games section of a Meijer store that features a bafflingly old game. [More]

“Walmart and Target aren’t the only ones with weird ‘value’ pricing,” a reader pointed out to us in an e-mail over the weekend. Indeed, wherever there are price tags, sales, and workers who are not encouraged to use common sense, you will find fuzzy math. [More]

As we learned when Spaghetti-Os sent a tweet commemorating the anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor with a flag-waving noodle, some people take offense to the commercialization of tragedies that maybe their grandparents might remember. How soon is too soon to commercialize a tragedy? Does that extend to the tragedies of our great-grandparents’ time, too? [More]

At a Meijer store in Michigan, it appears that where there’s fire, there’s an employee claiming he got fired. A store greeter says he lost his job for leaving his post, which is against the rules, but he only walked away to help a customer put out a van fire in the parking lot. [More]

Traditionally, “Black Friday” refers to the day after Thanksgiving and the semi-official kickoff of the winter holiday shopping season in the United States. In modern times, however, traditions are meaningless and retailers have decided to just throw Black Friday sales whenever they want. Like July 12. Or even February. [More]

We don’t hate the foot soldiers of retail here at Consumerist. What we hate are the processes that make lead to pointless non-sale signs posted on shelves that waste everyone’s time and either confuse customers or make them giggle. Here are two. [More]